Interesting thing most of the people I have talked to have missed. They've commented that CLU looked a little off, especially in the eyes. So the conclusion of many is that the tech just ain't quite there, however something occurred when watching (I was looking specifically for this bit).
When Flynn is having his storytime with his son at the beginning of the movie, he's also digitally restored to a youthful appearance. And he looks fine to me. There's none of whatever it is, and I agree it was there, that made CLU slightly bothersome to look at, at least for me. Therefore I believe that CLU's slightly off appearance, trigger to the uncanny valley as it were, is intentional.
I will admit there is another possibility, which is that it was there, however the more real backdrop of a young kid's bedroom vs the high contrast shiny of the world of the ghosts inside of the machine muted the effect enough to not be bothersome. That the setting compensated for the flaws in the composition, as it were.
Simple, buearucrats would rather have no answer than give the wrong one, therefore any investigation undertaken by the government would take at least a month to get rolling well.
Another trick we've seen (in fact they sell these things for an insane markup, and there's installation videos on youtube) is to bypass the meter on one phase. Pull your meter, put a shim across one side, (both sides will stop the meter entirely) and put meter back. Shims we've seen: Various wires, usually smaller than 20 gauge, soldered directly to the attachment points or meter. Plastic with wire wrapped around it spoons or knives, steel, tin, and silver. The actual shims that we can buy for various purposes; they cost $1.50 a piece. The website (with text lifted verbatim off one of those capacitor 'power factor adjustor' box sites) sells the shims for $199 each, with a video linked of a girl doing the install with high voltage gloves she got off ebay that have little white circles on them, meaning 'failed test here' (shudder).
If it wasn't for common sense audit type things (hmm there are people living here, lights on at night, but no service at this address) then hooking a house into power without a meter is here and there is actually pretty trivial and not likely to be noticed (22 building apartment on the other hand, much more noticable).
Well, most people who steal electricity generally ARE idiots, so yah.
The line crews do regular inspections of the system and we occasionally find more 'smartly done' thefts, but it's rare, and usually they are very dangerously wired.
I work for a electric (and gas, water, sewer, cable, internet, phone... talk about 'triple play') utility, though not on the electric side.
We can do isolation down to an area, though it's hard. Mostly we find people stealing power by looking at billing patterns. Most people steal power with a bypass at the meter of some sort. There's one company I can't find right now that sells a device we use to short past a meter. They cost us $2 a pair. These guys sell you one (cutting your energy bill 'in half' by cutting one phase out of the meter) for $199.99 + S+H. They give you wonderful videos on how to do the work, tell you to buy gloves on ebay for cheap (The gloves in the video have little white circles on them, indicating that they have failed safety tests at those points...)
Then there's the people that use 22-gauge wire, cheap steel spoons hammered flat, etc. We've had more than one burn their house down doing this.
As an added btw: We tested a couple of those 'power factor correction' devices. They do in fact change the power factor. They do not in fact lead to any noticeable savings because houses power factors are pretty even anyway. We came to the rough conclusion that the employee that had electric heat, water, electric dryer, and primarily used her electric oven and range to cook
My (Great depression era) house has lots of odd plugs. I've got the combo-duplex (double T 120 outlet), 4 different types of 240 outlets, including a nema 2-15 ungrounded, not counting the stove and dryer.
I also have a "1-15" ungrounded 'strip plug' where they just ran two slots the right distance apart and you could plug anywhere along its 18" length in the bathroom, but it's not live. It is part of the mirror molding though so tough to remove.
I've slowly been putting in grounded receptecles where I can, and using gfci gorunded where I can't (can add normal gorunds 'past' a gfci ground outlet if there is ground wiring from outlet to outlet, and still be 'to code', but I've not done that because it's either 3 wire all the way or 2 all the way). I've converted all the weird 240s (which were for window AC or heater units, house has central air now) to 120 since they had good wiring and were run using standard 2+1 12 gauge wire.
All my new outlets are shuttered, it costs like 50 cents more per.
There's also a 240V twist lock plug (not socket) run out under the deck.. I traced it back and it runs near the main breaker box, but is rolled up. I think someone intended to put a generator in at some point and never got around to finishing it up.
>In most markets you dont need a phone for DSL. You can get a dry loop.
some markets sure. In my market, dry loops are only available for business class service (3-4 times more expensive) and then you can't go through a third party dsl provider or reseller. I used to work for a company that did third party dsl (rboc's last mile, our bandwidth/mail/filtering) and we'd been promised dry loops for the whole half dozen+ years we were in the DSL business. About the time we went out of business they began offering dry loops, but only for the rboc's service, and as I said, business class.
>>My security alarm needs it
>Why cant it use wifi or why cant they provide their own communications? I shouldnt have to pay 40-50 dollars a month just in case my security system needs it. Sounds like a problem with the security company's lack of innovation.
There are wifi and cell based alarm systems. there are also 'bare copper' and internet linked alarms. All these options tend to be more expensive than having a basic land line for it to go through. And iirc a cell or landline based alarm has the advantage of failover-to-911 if the security provider isn't operating/reachable for some reason (in my state... the legality of that varies I'm sure).
A suggestion:
Download and burn Memtest x86+ onto a cd, make sure your computer can boot off of it, in fact, I'd run a test before reinstalling the memory that's bad.
Then install the memory and run memtest again. If it finds memory errors, you may very well be looking at a bad stick of ram. If it doesn't, you may be looking at subtle timing issues in your ram; I've found had machines that can pass a 7 day burn in running memory tests without error and can't get Windows booted up with a certain memory stick installed. I don't know if that says something about memory tests (I've used several), memory itself, motherboards, or Windows, but it is the nature of the beast. It can be as complex as timings that don't quite work with the motherboard or a power supply whose voltage drops a few tenths of a volt when the load from the graphics card comes up. It's one of the reasons I spend the extra 20% on 'name brand' (kingston, crucial, etc.. I'm not picky, just not buying generic green stuff), memory errors can be very subtle.
As to why things ran fine? a couple of possibilities:
Infant Mortality: Mass produced items (such as memory, pwoer supplies, hard drives) generally fail quickly or last a long time. It could be
Marginal building corruption: Files have been messed up. the registry is a little borked. The system SEEMS fine but in reality has become a little corrupted from the bad ram. With the additional errors caused by the ram, pci.sys wouldn't load. Now it works, but you may run into other problems down the road
And what I'd probably say when you called:
If you've added ram in the last month, then it's very likely that, remove the ram and see if it boots. Even if it appears to work, there could be subtle problems that crop up. Try it and see. If removing the ram doesn't work, it could be:
a: Motherboard
b: Hard Drive
c: Still the ram
d: The hard drive connector cable (I have 80% of a sata cable on my wall, the cable of doom. 3 computers would boot and run with that cable on it's hard drive, but will bluescreen or segfault within 2-3 hours of power on, unless all the hard drives were hitachi. the reason it's 80% is I cut the end off after it got put into the third machine, even with a 'funky do not use' label attached. Why do I keep it? First time I threw it away someone dug it out of the trash and used it. I dunno about people, honestly).
e: Windows PMSing
f: Power Supply... yes if it's almost but not quite powerful enough it'll make a machine go wonky, really.
g: Power strip. You laugh. I've had at least a dozen machines that were fine when taken off the dollar store power strips some people use.
h: The computer gods are laughing not with you, but at you: Seriously. I had a Dell that wouldn't work at the secretary's desk. It worked elsewhere in the office, plugged into the same keyboard/mouse/printer/monitor, even ran an extention cord back to keep it plugged in the same power strip. We finally swapped hard drives with another same model Dell, moving the rest of the machine across the room, and both machines were solid as a rock.
But, does it lower insurance premiums more than the cost per year in wages, benefits, employer contributed SS taxes, unemployment contributions and additional worker comp insurance per additional required employee?
If this is being shipped with the 'current OS', that means security updates and patches for Windows XP will need to be continued throughout Windows 7's lifetime.
Just because the underlying operating system is 'secure' does not mean the virtual OS does also not need to be patched.
So this may be a good thing for current uses of XP as well, it depends on how Microsoft controls and implements that patching.
Well my home was built in 1935 and is still standing, so it's not for me to comment on modern building practices... but not all of us live within reach of hurricanes.
I game, browse, watch movies and listen to music on the computer in blissful noise free environment.
Step 1: Upgrade your keyboard, mouse, etc to usb if they are not already, and your monitors/video to use dvi cables. Step 2: buy a length of 2" OD pvc pipe, for most people 2 feet or so should be enough, and a cutter for it. Also a hole cutter bit to fit (usually 2 and 1/16") and some sealing caulk. Step 3: Get cables and usb hubs as needed. Step 4: Drill a hole through the wall, fit the pipes in them, and caulk the pipes in place. Run cables through the wall from the computers to your workstation. For the last little bit get a bit of foam and stuff it in to insulate/noise seal the pipes. One of the above pipes I have 2 DVI cables, 2 usb, and 2 5.1 cable bundles. If I'm doing something requireing a lot of disk changing, I hook up a usb DVD drive to that computer.
I'm planning to do something similar in the living room with my media pc, putting it through the wall into a closet. you have to be careful there that it is somewhere that has good circulation (this one is, the central air intake for the house is in there, through a vented door.)
Total cost of special components, including dvd drive and long DVI cables, $150.
To make it look 'nice', I slapped a couple of standard wall plates over the spots where the pipes are (the duplex style, because I have two holes for 3 pc's+ a cat 5 cable for if I want to set my laptop up in that room).
This isn't for everyone, for example renters, or those living in cement walled houses (though it's not impossible there), but if you can manage it, things are really nice.
(My computers are in a rack mounted in a spare room that looks like just some sort of cabinet, so it doesn't stand out except for the noise it makes)
As a SWG player off and on for a while, (I still couldn't smuggle last time I quit. I did enjoy the space combat though) I found the worst part being the schizto constant 'rewrites of the way things are' to be the biggest issue, and I'm afraid I know where it came from; Lucasarts
Sony made the game, but unlike all the rest of Sony's titles, apparently Lucasarts has a strong creative control on the content and mechinisms. Comments about this that and the other 'vetoed by Lucasarts'... the NGE was basically forced on the game by Lucasarts, who felt 'it's Star Wars, there should be 5 million players, not the measly 300k we've got' Stuff would show up in need of fixing, their would be posts about how a fix was in testing... then a 6 month wait for deployment, which is worse than any other game they ran. My suspicion was that the 6 months was getting Lucasarts to vet any change in the game, even fixes.
Example: The 'big' ships (basically, light freighters) have turrets manned by secondary players. Those players pretty much can't hit unless you basically fly straight and level; apparently in a galaxy far, far away they never invented gyroscopic motion compensation for turrets. If a ship tried to manuver, you couldn't track your targets worth a damn.
I remember when I was playing (It's been a couple of years now since I've been in) that the devs liked the idea, and had even mentioned putting it in place on their internal test server.
It finally got added with the last expansion, because one of the hooks were new multiplayer vessels (gunboats) which were non-flyers without it. Some comments I read around in the intervening time indicated that the whole motion compensation thing was blocked by, you guessed it, Lucasarts, because it 'didn't match the feel of the movies space combat'.
Mind you, Raph was an ass too. He gets a good part of the blame, but together He and Lucasarts can destroy a galaxy....
Oh mercy these idiots... I had $100 worth of 'services' on my phone bill added a few months ago from these guys. They assured me someone signed up on their site and the money would be taken off the bill. After the second go around I took the already-filed police report for the id theft and faxed it to my phone company, and they yanked the charge off of my bill for me.
Millions of people buy new cars every year. Because they are shiny, usually. 15.5 million is the running estimate for 2008, and that's a 10 year low. That's in the US. (Numbers found by google, and estimate made as of April. Actual results may vary).
If they are able to produce an electric vehicle without the 'electric premium cost', they could easily get a few million more on the road in a year or two.
(And for the record, where I work there are around 100 people. That I know of 20 or so of them have traded in perfectly serviceable cars or light trucks, usually while still paying on them, for new, shiny, high gas mileage vehicles, with even larger payments on them. When it doesn't really add up financially to do so.)
Box in the warehouse has a bios boot password. It is clearable, but there's a problem, the hard drives are 'locked' and are only unlocked by a code stored in the bios during later part of boot. And clearing the bios boot password also clears the lock code.
The guy who set it up drove his car through a red light and got his neck broken. He apparently didn't write down this password.
They ended up sending one set of the mirrored drives to a data recovery house.
Fortunately it was not mission critical, merely 'important' data.
So I'm sure it's doable to make the situation untenable 'on purpose'.
My current car has over it's lifespan (a few months less than 2 years since I purchased it) cost me approximatly $2200 in gas, getting an median of about 25 mpg, which isn't bad considering that it's a 4 door sedan non-hyrid. That's 19k miles since I purchased it. I can tag on another $1100 in parts, services, and miscellaneous expenses related to the vehicle, though not insurance. It cost me about $4500. A similar quality/mileage used hybrid, tough to find even 2 years ago, was approximatly $10000. I don't hazard a guess what it would be now.
My SUV I had prior was a smaller one, I averaged about 19 mpg (median 19.2 in the spreadsheet) in it. I sold it mainly because it required a full set of struts and the steering needed a lot of work; It had 220k miles on it, I had purchased it with 70k, so I think I got my 4 grand out of it. I sold it on the curb for $500 to a guy who uses it to carry lawnmowers in his business(it had the towing package, which I never used).
Note that my results may not be typical. The entire time I owned the SUV, I never had the brakes replaced. The last 3 times I had them checked I was 'are you realllly sure they are fine, I've put 100k on them'. I don't remember the SUV's EPA mileage ratings, but my current car is 20/24.
Gas for the same period/mileage on my SUV would have been: $2900. For a 45 mpg hybrid: $1200
Now let's set the wayback machine the wrong way for $6 a gallon. I pull down about 11k miles a year, more or less. at 11k a year: SUV: $3500 current Car: $2600 Hybrid 45: $1500 (rounded of course, I'm lazy) It would cost me 5 years worth of gas to purchase the equivilant hybrid over my sedan. I imagine I can get the equivilant suv for about $1000 less, so figure about 3 years for the SUV to equal the payout.
Where am I going with this? I dunno. Though I will say most people don't think that far ahead. (also, most people will be paying interest on a large car purchase like the hybrid mentioned above.)
You won't get legally imprisoned, lashed, deported or worse for naming a teddy bear or drawing a cartoon based on any religion inside the United States, which is where most of the Co$'s legal bullying goes on.
While I agree with getting rid of the nanny state mentality the US has these days...
Party Poker...
Right...
Pardon me if I refuse to consider 'legitimate' any company whose url shortcuts are deposited on people's desktops by spyware.
We have a customer that has purchased 7 laptops with Vista on them (not from us, we don't sell laptops). Several came with premium. He has purchased 7 boxed copies of Vista Ultimate and had us install them on the machines. So that's 14 right there. I wonder how many of these people have 2+ licenses due to upgrading versions.
Slashdot Mirror
A game I play (Final Fantasy 11) has taken their servers, etc... offline for at least the next week, starting Saturday evening their time.
Also a lot of extraneous power usage (lighting monuments, for example) has been shut down as well.
As I said the flashbacks didn't bother me. Maybe it was the setting and my tolerance is higher. I dunno.
Interesting thing most of the people I have talked to have missed. They've commented that CLU looked a little off, especially in the eyes. So the conclusion of many is that the tech just ain't quite there, however something occurred when watching (I was looking specifically for this bit).
When Flynn is having his storytime with his son at the beginning of the movie, he's also digitally restored to a youthful appearance. And he looks fine to me. There's none of whatever it is, and I agree it was there, that made CLU slightly bothersome to look at, at least for me. Therefore I believe that CLU's slightly off appearance, trigger to the uncanny valley as it were, is intentional.
I will admit there is another possibility, which is that it was there, however the more real backdrop of a young kid's bedroom vs the high contrast shiny of the world of the ghosts inside of the machine muted the effect enough to not be bothersome. That the setting compensated for the flaws in the composition, as it were.
Simple, buearucrats would rather have no answer than give the wrong one, therefore any investigation undertaken by the government would take at least a month to get rolling well.
Another trick we've seen (in fact they sell these things for an insane markup, and there's installation videos on youtube) is to bypass the meter on one phase. Pull your meter, put a shim across one side, (both sides will stop the meter entirely) and put meter back.
Shims we've seen: Various wires, usually smaller than 20 gauge, soldered directly to the attachment points or meter.
Plastic with wire wrapped around it
spoons or knives, steel, tin, and silver.
The actual shims that we can buy for various purposes; they cost $1.50 a piece. The website (with text lifted verbatim off one of those capacitor 'power factor adjustor' box sites) sells the shims for $199 each, with a video linked of a girl doing the install with high voltage gloves she got off ebay that have little white circles on them, meaning 'failed test here' (shudder).
If it wasn't for common sense audit type things (hmm there are people living here, lights on at night, but no service at this address) then hooking a house into power without a meter is here and there is actually pretty trivial and not likely to be noticed (22 building apartment on the other hand, much more noticable).
Well, most people who steal electricity generally ARE idiots, so yah.
The line crews do regular inspections of the system and we occasionally find more 'smartly done' thefts, but it's rare, and usually they are very dangerously wired.
I work for a electric (and gas, water, sewer, cable, internet, phone... talk about 'triple play') utility, though not on the electric side. We can do isolation down to an area, though it's hard. Mostly we find people stealing power by looking at billing patterns. Most people steal power with a bypass at the meter of some sort. There's one company I can't find right now that sells a device we use to short past a meter. They cost us $2 a pair. These guys sell you one (cutting your energy bill 'in half' by cutting one phase out of the meter) for $199.99 + S+H. They give you wonderful videos on how to do the work, tell you to buy gloves on ebay for cheap (The gloves in the video have little white circles on them, indicating that they have failed safety tests at those points...) Then there's the people that use 22-gauge wire, cheap steel spoons hammered flat, etc. We've had more than one burn their house down doing this. As an added btw: We tested a couple of those 'power factor correction' devices. They do in fact change the power factor. They do not in fact lead to any noticeable savings because houses power factors are pretty even anyway. We came to the rough conclusion that the employee that had electric heat, water, electric dryer, and primarily used her electric oven and range to cook
My (Great depression era) house has lots of odd plugs. I've got the combo-duplex (double T 120 outlet), 4 different types of 240 outlets, including a nema 2-15 ungrounded, not counting the stove and dryer. I also have a "1-15" ungrounded 'strip plug' where they just ran two slots the right distance apart and you could plug anywhere along its 18" length in the bathroom, but it's not live. It is part of the mirror molding though so tough to remove. I've slowly been putting in grounded receptecles where I can, and using gfci gorunded where I can't (can add normal gorunds 'past' a gfci ground outlet if there is ground wiring from outlet to outlet, and still be 'to code', but I've not done that because it's either 3 wire all the way or 2 all the way). I've converted all the weird 240s (which were for window AC or heater units, house has central air now) to 120 since they had good wiring and were run using standard 2+1 12 gauge wire. All my new outlets are shuttered, it costs like 50 cents more per. There's also a 240V twist lock plug (not socket) run out under the deck.. I traced it back and it runs near the main breaker box, but is rolled up. I think someone intended to put a generator in at some point and never got around to finishing it up.
>In most markets you dont need a phone for DSL. You can get a dry loop.
some markets sure. In my market, dry loops are only available for business class service (3-4 times more expensive) and then you can't go through a third party dsl provider or reseller. I used to work for a company that did third party dsl (rboc's last mile, our bandwidth/mail/filtering) and we'd been promised dry loops for the whole half dozen+ years we were in the DSL business. About the time we went out of business they began offering dry loops, but only for the rboc's service, and as I said, business class.
>>My security alarm needs it
>Why cant it use wifi or why cant they provide their own communications? I shouldnt have to pay 40-50 dollars a month just in case my security system needs it. Sounds like a problem with the security company's lack of innovation.
There are wifi and cell based alarm systems. there are also 'bare copper' and internet linked alarms. All these options tend to be more expensive than having a basic land line for it to go through. And iirc a cell or landline based alarm has the advantage of failover-to-911 if the security provider isn't operating/reachable for some reason (in my state... the legality of that varies I'm sure).
Download and burn Memtest x86+ onto a cd, make sure your computer can boot off of it, in fact, I'd run a test before reinstalling the memory that's bad.
Then install the memory and run memtest again. If it finds memory errors, you may very well be looking at a bad stick of ram. If it doesn't, you may be looking at subtle timing issues in your ram; I've found had machines that can pass a 7 day burn in running memory tests without error and can't get Windows booted up with a certain memory stick installed. I don't know if that says something about memory tests (I've used several), memory itself, motherboards, or Windows, but it is the nature of the beast. It can be as complex as timings that don't quite work with the motherboard or a power supply whose voltage drops a few tenths of a volt when the load from the graphics card comes up. It's one of the reasons I spend the extra 20% on 'name brand' (kingston, crucial, etc.. I'm not picky, just not buying generic green stuff), memory errors can be very subtle.
As to why things ran fine? a couple of possibilities:
And what I'd probably say when you called:
If you've added ram in the last month, then it's very likely that, remove the ram and see if it boots. Even if it appears to work, there could be subtle problems that crop up. Try it and see. If removing the ram doesn't work, it could be:
a: Motherboard
b: Hard Drive
c: Still the ram
d: The hard drive connector cable (I have 80% of a sata cable on my wall, the cable of doom. 3 computers would boot and run with that cable on it's hard drive, but will bluescreen or segfault within 2-3 hours of power on, unless all the hard drives were hitachi. the reason it's 80% is I cut the end off after it got put into the third machine, even with a 'funky do not use' label attached. Why do I keep it? First time I threw it away someone dug it out of the trash and used it. I dunno about people, honestly).
e: Windows PMSing
f: Power Supply... yes if it's almost but not quite powerful enough it'll make a machine go wonky, really.
g: Power strip. You laugh. I've had at least a dozen machines that were fine when taken off the dollar store power strips some people use.
h: The computer gods are laughing not with you, but at you: Seriously. I had a Dell that wouldn't work at the secretary's desk. It worked elsewhere in the office, plugged into the same keyboard/mouse/printer/monitor, even ran an extention cord back to keep it plugged in the same power strip. We finally swapped hard drives with another same model Dell, moving the rest of the machine across the room, and both machines were solid as a rock.
There is no sanctuary!
But, does it lower insurance premiums more than the cost per year in wages, benefits, employer contributed SS taxes, unemployment contributions and additional worker comp insurance per additional required employee?
If this is being shipped with the 'current OS', that means security updates and patches for Windows XP will need to be continued throughout Windows 7's lifetime. Just because the underlying operating system is 'secure' does not mean the virtual OS does also not need to be patched. So this may be a good thing for current uses of XP as well, it depends on how Microsoft controls and implements that patching.
Well my home was built in 1935 and is still standing, so it's not for me to comment on modern building practices... but not all of us live within reach of hurricanes.
I game, browse, watch movies and listen to music on the computer in blissful noise free environment.
Step 1: Upgrade your keyboard, mouse, etc to usb if they are not already, and your monitors/video to use dvi cables.
Step 2: buy a length of 2" OD pvc pipe, for most people 2 feet or so should be enough, and a cutter for it. Also a hole cutter bit to fit (usually 2 and 1/16") and some sealing caulk.
Step 3: Get cables and usb hubs as needed.
Step 4: Drill a hole through the wall, fit the pipes in them, and caulk the pipes in place. Run cables through the wall from the computers to your workstation. For the last little bit get a bit of foam and stuff it in to insulate/noise seal the pipes. One of the above pipes I have 2 DVI cables, 2 usb, and 2 5.1 cable bundles. If I'm doing something requireing a lot of disk changing, I hook up a usb DVD drive to that computer.
I'm planning to do something similar in the living room with my media pc, putting it through the wall into a closet. you have to be careful there that it is somewhere that has good circulation (this one is, the central air intake for the house is in there, through a vented door.)
Total cost of special components, including dvd drive and long DVI cables, $150.
To make it look 'nice', I slapped a couple of standard wall plates over the spots where the pipes are (the duplex style, because I have two holes for 3 pc's+ a cat 5 cable for if I want to set my laptop up in that room).
This isn't for everyone, for example renters, or those living in cement walled houses (though it's not impossible there), but if you can manage it, things are really nice.
(My computers are in a rack mounted in a spare room that looks like just some sort of cabinet, so it doesn't stand out except for the noise it makes)
As a SWG player off and on for a while, (I still couldn't smuggle last time I quit. I did enjoy the space combat though) I found the worst part being the schizto constant 'rewrites of the way things are' to be the biggest issue, and I'm afraid I know where it came from; Lucasarts
Sony made the game, but unlike all the rest of Sony's titles, apparently Lucasarts has a strong creative control on the content and mechinisms. Comments about this that and the other 'vetoed by Lucasarts'... the NGE was basically forced on the game by Lucasarts, who felt 'it's Star Wars, there should be 5 million players, not the measly 300k we've got' Stuff would show up in need of fixing, their would be posts about how a fix was in testing... then a 6 month wait for deployment, which is worse than any other game they ran. My suspicion was that the 6 months was getting Lucasarts to vet any change in the game, even fixes.
Example: The 'big' ships (basically, light freighters) have turrets manned by secondary players. Those players pretty much can't hit unless you basically fly straight and level; apparently in a galaxy far, far away they never invented gyroscopic motion compensation for turrets. If a ship tried to manuver, you couldn't track your targets worth a damn.
I remember when I was playing (It's been a couple of years now since I've been in) that the devs liked the idea, and had even mentioned putting it in place on their internal test server.
It finally got added with the last expansion, because one of the hooks were new multiplayer vessels (gunboats) which were non-flyers without it. Some comments I read around in the intervening time indicated that the whole motion compensation thing was blocked by, you guessed it, Lucasarts, because it 'didn't match the feel of the movies space combat'.
Mind you, Raph was an ass too. He gets a good part of the blame, but together He and Lucasarts can destroy a galaxy....
Oh mercy these idiots... I had $100 worth of 'services' on my phone bill added a few months ago from these guys. They assured me someone signed up on their site and the money would be taken off the bill. After the second go around I took the already-filed police report for the id theft and faxed it to my phone company, and they yanked the charge off of my bill for me.
Millions of people buy new cars every year. Because they are shiny, usually. 15.5 million is the running estimate for 2008, and that's a 10 year low. That's in the US. (Numbers found by google, and estimate made as of April. Actual results may vary).
If they are able to produce an electric vehicle without the 'electric premium cost', they could easily get a few million more on the road in a year or two.
(And for the record, where I work there are around 100 people. That I know of 20 or so of them have traded in perfectly serviceable cars or light trucks, usually while still paying on them, for new, shiny, high gas mileage vehicles, with even larger payments on them. When it doesn't really add up financially to do so.)
Box in the warehouse has a bios boot password. It is clearable, but there's a problem, the hard drives are 'locked' and are only unlocked by a code stored in the bios during later part of boot. And clearing the bios boot password also clears the lock code.
The guy who set it up drove his car through a red light and got his neck broken. He apparently didn't write down this password.
They ended up sending one set of the mirrored drives to a data recovery house.
Fortunately it was not mission critical, merely 'important' data.
So I'm sure it's doable to make the situation untenable 'on purpose'.
My current car has over it's lifespan (a few months less than 2 years since I purchased it) cost me approximatly $2200 in gas, getting an median of about 25 mpg, which isn't bad considering that it's a 4 door sedan non-hyrid. That's 19k miles since I purchased it. I can tag on another $1100 in parts, services, and miscellaneous expenses related to the vehicle, though not insurance. It cost me about $4500. A similar quality/mileage used hybrid, tough to find even 2 years ago, was approximatly $10000. I don't hazard a guess what it would be now.
My SUV I had prior was a smaller one, I averaged about 19 mpg (median 19.2 in the spreadsheet) in it. I sold it mainly because it required a full set of struts and the steering needed a lot of work; It had 220k miles on it, I had purchased it with 70k, so I think I got my 4 grand out of it. I sold it on the curb for $500 to a guy who uses it to carry lawnmowers in his business(it had the towing package, which I never used).
Note that my results may not be typical. The entire time I owned the SUV, I never had the brakes replaced. The last 3 times I had them checked I was 'are you realllly sure they are fine, I've put 100k on them'. I don't remember the SUV's EPA mileage ratings, but my current car is 20/24.
Gas for the same period/mileage on my SUV would have been: $2900.
For a 45 mpg hybrid: $1200
Now let's set the wayback machine the wrong way for $6 a gallon. I pull down about 11k miles a year, more or less.
at 11k a year:
SUV: $3500
current Car: $2600
Hybrid 45: $1500
(rounded of course, I'm lazy)
It would cost me 5 years worth of gas to purchase the equivilant hybrid over my sedan. I imagine I can get the equivilant suv for about $1000 less, so figure about 3 years for the SUV to equal the payout.
Where am I going with this? I dunno. Though I will say most people don't think that far ahead. (also, most people will be paying interest on a large car purchase like the hybrid mentioned above.)
You won't get legally imprisoned, lashed, deported or worse for naming a teddy bear or drawing a cartoon based on any religion inside the United States, which is where most of the Co$'s legal bullying goes on.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those...
The cake is a lie.
While I agree with getting rid of the nanny state mentality the US has these days... Party Poker ...
Right...
Pardon me if I refuse to consider 'legitimate' any company whose url shortcuts are deposited on people's desktops by spyware.
We have a customer that has purchased 7 laptops with Vista on them (not from us, we don't sell laptops). Several came with premium. He has purchased 7 boxed copies of Vista Ultimate and had us install them on the machines. So that's 14 right there. I wonder how many of these people have 2+ licenses due to upgrading versions.